What's the best way to deal with zero-area faces that break normals
There is a tool specifically for this.


First select all faces (typically selecting the entire mesh is fine).
Access this menu item from the 3D View: Mesh -&gt; Cleanup -&gt; Degenerate Dissolve to remove zero area faces, zero length edges.


Using dissolve is useful because it won't make holes where the faces used to be, it simply removes the face and merges surrounding edges.

you can change the threshold as a tool option.